New York Markets After Hours

10 secrets of the Super Bowl

JonnelleMarte

Reuters

Denver Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning

1. “Good luck getting a ticket.”

More than 82,000 football fans are expected to pack into MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J., to see the Seattle Seahawks battle the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII on Feb. 2. But as ticket prices have escalated over the years, watching the game from inside the stadium has become a fantastic notion for the typical fan. Tickets on the resale market were averaging $3,000 each a week before this year’s game, almost 40% more than the average ticket sold in 2013, according to TiqIQ, a ticket aggregator. And prices can go as high as $700,000 for a suite.

Ticket prices start between $500 and $1,200, but are marked up when they are resold in the secondary market, where the unusually high number of buyers chasing tickets to the once-a-year extravaganza drives prices through the roof.

And believe it or not, things could have been even more expensive for fans this year. In an effort to make the game more affordable, the National Football League says it doubled the number of tickets being sold directly to fans via a lottery, to 1,000 this year. It also lowered the price of the cheapest ticket, from $650 to $500. And resale prices dropped steeply a week before the game, largely because of the cold weather, ticket brokers say.

One reason landing that coveted ticket isn’t as simple as first-come, first-served is that the National Football League doesn’t distribute tickets evenly across the country: 35% of the tickets are split between the two participating teams; 6.2% are split between the host teams, the New York Giants and New York Jets; and 1.2% go to each of the remaining 28 teams. (The league retains the remaining 25.2% of the tickets to sell to the media, sponsors and partners.) And teams can hand out the tickets however they like, with some teams giving all tickets to sponsors, executives and players, says Matheson. Some teams hold raffles for season ticket holders, but with each team having roughly 70,000 season ticket holders and about 1,000 tickets, the odds are “not very good,” says Victor Matheson, a professor of economics at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass.

Then there are the last-minute travel costs, since fans don’t know until two weeks before the game whether their team will play, making it harder for them to save by booking early. Hotel rates in host cities typically double during Super Bowl weekend, according to Matheson. “The Super Bowl has always been an event for the elite,” says Matheson.

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